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Answering questions about Speer requires analyzing Speer's psyche to reveal the workings of his mind. Many have tried to do such an analysis. Certainly such an undertaking might seem inappropriate for someone who is not an expert in that field. This was a criticism I occasionally received from friends or relatives when I told them I wanted to express my personal view and observations about Speer. After a thorough consideration of all aspects of this project, however, I decided that there were compelling reasons to continue.
The factors that influenced me to go ahead were many. First, I was one of the few people who had the chance to talk with Speer in 1946 and to compare him with the other Nazi leaders who were at Nuremberg. Our conversations were intensive and I remember them vividly. In addition, this was a critical juncture in his life. By the same token one might say that I am an authority on the Nuremberg trial by virtue of my participation on the prosecution side. And finally, I believed there was meaning for all of us in Speer's story.
My interest in Speer and in Hitler has never ceased. In fact, it has grown. I have closely followed the histories and commentaries written about this era. I have a very strong and comprehensive personal library of books dealing with the Third Reich.
I believe that my extensive contacts with Speer afford a logical basis for my writing a book about him. All of my experience with Speer is first-hand. I knew him over a long period of time, I had continuing contact with him, and I have many reasons to believe that he was always candid with me. In our talks both while he was in prison at Nuremberg and after his release from Spandau I found him to be very open. Some evidence my impression was right is that in my first interview after his release from Spandau, Speer gave me copies of the letters he had written to his children from prison.
I always wondered what the deeper meaning of this gesture was. In retrospect I feel that it was a gesture of intimacy and appreciation for the fact that I had come to see him so often. I took his sharing these letters with me as evidence of his trust and faith in me. Speer and I had discussed our relations with Our children and these letters were part of the context of those discussions.
I have added more information to that provided by my own knowledge of Speer by interviewing other witnesses of the time. I spoke with many people who knew Speer personally and with whom I already had built up a special relationship. And finally, I added insights gained from these interviews .
I contacted Speer's Nuremberg attorney, Dr. Hans Flachsner, between 1963 and 1964 when I was unable to get in touch with Speer. He graciously agreed to talk to me, so I saw Dr. Flachsner for two solid days of interviews on September 20 and 21 in 1964 at the Berlin Hilton. At that time, Dr. Flachsner was a successful lawyer in West Berlin. His memories of his dealings with Speer as his client at Nuremberg were razor sharp. He also seemed to have a deep understanding of Speer as a person. He was extremely knowledgeable about Speer's relations with Hitler and other members of the Nazi hierarchy.
Flachsner was a self-described liberal and did not fit with the Nazis, despite the fact that when very young, in 1924, he had served briefly as Goering's lawyer. He defended Goering when he was sued for failing to pay doctors who attempted to cure him of his addiction to morphine, an addiction Goering developed after he was wounded in the abortive Munich Putsch of 1923. Flachsner said that he was given the choice of defending Rudolf Hess, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, or Speer and that he chose Speer (Sereny 1995, 566). (Speer remembers matters somewhat differently and indicates that it was he who chose Flachsner after an initial discussion with him [Speer 1970, 511]).
Flachsner informed me that from the start Speer told him he wanted to admit his guilt. Flachsner told Speer that such an admission was sheer madness, particularly in view of the size and scope of the crimes involved. It seems clear that despite their differences, the relationship between them was open and direct and characterized by mutual respect during the entire proceedings.
Because so little supportive documentation was available, Flachsner said, Speer's defense was difficult. Annemarie Kempf, Speer's former secretary, played a critical role in helping Flachsner make up this deficiency. She was smart and resourceful and her loyalty to Speer was total.
Flachsner said he also questioned Speer about his knowledge of the horrors occurring at Auschwitz and the extermination camps in the East. He pointed out that Speer was continually at Hitler's military headquarters and that he asked Speer whether Hitler's generals ever discussed such matters with him. Speer said they did not.
My talks with Flachsner were highlighted by a memorable dinner my wife and I had as guests of him and his wife at a notable Berlin restaurant He put no limits on my questions, which were very broad and sweeping. I talked to him extensively because I wanted to explore as fully as possible Speer's assumption of his share of responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich at Nuremberg. I also wondered what Dr. Flachsner knew about how Speer was handling the long separation from his family.
I believed that Speer's exchanges with Flachsner were candid and I knew that Flachsner had a good reputation as a lawyer. In short, I felt that our exchanges would be open, honest, and totally candid, and my assumption proved to be right. As a matter of fact, Flachsner was well acquainted with Speer's relationship with his family while he was in prison. I frankly doubt that any of the other attorneys who served as counsel to the Nuremberg defendants knew their clients as well as Flachsner knew Speer.
Because I wanted to get a third party's insight into the Hitler/Speer relationship, I got in touch with Frau Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary. She had been at Hitler's headquarters from November 1942 until the end of the war and had worked as his secretary from January I, 1943, until his death on April 30, 1945. Her observations on Hitler are well documented in her book Voices from the Bunker.(1) In addition to her secretarial duties, she was required to have either lunch and tea or dinner with Hitler every day. I was convinced that her observations on Speer's relationship with Hitler would be important. I first tried to see her in July 1981, when I had my last interview with Speer. Unfortunately, we did not meet because Frau Junge was planning to visit her sister in Australia at the time. I did not pursue her further for an interview until considerably later.
My second attempt to interview Frau Junge was successful. I interviewed her in Munich in December 1992. I found her to be a softspoken, gentle woman, gracious and still beautiful as she greeted a guest in her well appointed apartment in Munich. On the other hand, she is also the woman who served as Hitler's personal secretary even as he prepared to take his life in the last days of the Third Reich. Today she remains the last living window into the mind of the man who has come to personify evil in the twentieth century.
Frau Junge was with Hitler constantly during much of Speer's tenure as Armaments Minister. Consequently her observations on Hitler's personality and on the Speer/Hitler relationship are of special importance.
I had a second chance to talk to Frau Junge in November 1994. Always at the start of my interviews with her, she was careful to set forth the limitations of her knowledge based on her position. But her answers revealed that she was a close observer of Hitler and of his relationship with others in the Nazi hierarchy. Moreover, her duties with Hitler required her to be available at all times on a seven-days-a-week basis.
Finally, to gain an insight into Speer's relationship with his family, I talked during the same period with his oldest daughter, Hilde Schramm, in Berlin. I would have had difficulty securing this interview had it not been for the help of Charles Taylor, a Philadelphia attorney. I had met Charles in connection with a project I was working on for the American Bar Association. He and I both wrote chapters of a book designed to help American lawyers in international endeavors. (As an incentive, we were invited, together with other prospective writers, for a weekend at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Charles and I completed our ends of the bargain by writing the chapter to which we had been assigned. We have been good friends ever since.)
Charles had long been a friend of the Speer family. He had become well acquainted with Hilde through an international student exchange program and through the years they have maintained their friendship.
I knew Hilde's general observations about her father would be very important and I found her to be surprisingly objective in that regard. Frau Schramm herself has had a distinguished career as leader of the Green Party in Berlin and as Vice President of the Berlin City Council. She is currently in charge of a program designed to ameliorate conflicts between East Germans and refugees from the former Yugoslavia. She has a great deal of spark and commitment.
I saw her for a long Sunday interview that was interrupted at 5:30 p.m. when she had to go to her office to complete a report for a Monday meeting. She was then a fifty-eight-year-old divorcee. Hilde's observations of Speer were on the critical side; in no sense did she attempt to exonerate him. He had committed heinous crimes, she said, and his Nuremberg sentence was fully justified.
Hilde told me she had little contact with her father during his years with Hitler. Her relationship with her father did not develop until Speer was imprisoned in Spandau. I believe this was in part because of her persistent efforts to secure Speer's release before the end of the term of twenty years. She worked fervently, if unsuccessfully, to secure his freedom.
Speer's second book, Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976), is replete with references to Hilde, especially to her efforts on his behalf. Hilde worked hard to build a relationship with her father. Moreover, I think Speer developed a strong sense of family in his Spandau and post-Spandau years and that this enhanced his feeling toward Hilde.
Hilde gave great credit to her mother for successfully keeping the family together during the twenty-one years Speer spent in prison. With a family of six children, this was not easy, and Hilde told me that her mother showed great strength. It was clear to me that Hilde admired her mother greatly.
I got different perspectives on Speer from all of these people. Dr. Flachsner gave me a picture of Speer at time of a great crisis. From Frau Junge I got insights into the Hitler/Speer relationship. Finally, Speer's eldest daughter helped me to get an impression of their family life. Thus, I now have a more solid basis for judgment about Speer.
Over the years, I have collected additional information by reviewing my own files and the records of the Nuremberg court and its judgment. I have studied the other evaluations of Speer. I reviewed Speer's own minutes of his meetings with Hitler, which were widely circulated and which offer evidence of the frequency of those meetings. I spent long hours with many people who knew Speer. Above all, I probed the recesses and assessed the nuances of my own memory of Speer and the impressions I had formed of him in 1946 at Nuremberg and thereafter.
To sum up, I believe that I have a good basis for offering my insights into the changes which took place in Speer's psyche during and after the years of his service to Hitler and to others. Other historians have gathered much more information, and I certainly never approached my book scientifically. However, I am convinced that this difference is rather an advantage in terms of reaching the goals I set for myself. I was always intrigued by Speer, his history and personality. And I wanted to determine to my satisfaction why I found him unique. Finally, some comparisons between Speer's situation and my own warrant attention and I wanted to identify publicly the similarities and differences.
Note: (1) The book is actually under the names of Pierre Galante and Eugene Silianoff, but its content consists almost totally of Traudl Junge's eyewitness account of her work with Hitler from 1943 until his suicide in 1945.
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